AUTHORS: George Orwell

  George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English novelist and social critic. Orwell became famous with his novel 1984, published in 1949. The book is a frightening portrait of a totalitarian society that punishes love, destroys privacy, and distorts truth. The grim tone of 1984 distinguishes it from Orwell's Animal Farm, an animal fable satirizing Communism.
Orwell was a unique combination of middle-class intellectual and working-class reformer. A strong autobiographical element runs through most of Orwell's writing, giving both his novels and essays a sense of immediacy and conviction. For example, his experiences living in poverty color A Clergyman's Daughter. The novel attacks social injustice and ranges from the miseries and hypocrisies of the poor of middle-class background to the near-starvation of the slumdweller. Orwell was born in Bengal, India, the son of an English civil servant. He attended Eton University from 1917 to 1921 and served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927. He lived in poverty in England and Europe until the mid-1930's, as mentioned above.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Updated on: Tuesday, August 25, 1998 02:33:27 PM